Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Julian Murphet, Mark Steven

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441198198
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road brings together several leading literary scholars, one major philosopher, as well as a handful of emerging critical voices, all of whom deploy their own specialist methods in order to think through this bestselling, Zeitgeist-defining event of contemporary literature. There are two dominant modes of analysis gathered here: the first, performed by Julian Murphet, Paul Sheehan, and Mark Steven, is to locate the novel within its political, spiritual, and economic climates; the second, whose exponents include Paul Patton, Sean Pryor, Chris Danta, and Grace Hellyer, deals with the formal dimensions of McCarthy's characteristically brilliant prose in relation to its sparse narrative. By coupling historically sensitive analysis with incisive formal criticism, the contributors not only account for the matchless form of this exemplary novel; they also suggest that The Road has something unique to disclose about the world we inhabit.

1

Introduction: “The charred ruins of a library”

MARK STEVEN AND JULIAN MURPHET

Is the book really, as many contemporary soothsayers would have it, in its death throes as a medium? Its five hundred years of unparalleled success—monopoly, even—in the storage and dissemination of information over, has the codex come up against its own irreversible extinction? Walter Benjamin was already thinking something of this sort when, in 1931, he contemplated the image of his personal library sealed up in multiple wooden crates. There he foretold the end of personal libraries assembled by literary subjects. “I do know that night is coming for the type that I am discussing here,” he writes: “But, as Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehended.”¹ If a personal library is the physiognomy of its collector’s soul, if it gives material body to a spirit shaped by literature, then the passing of its time on earth will surely have altered the face of the world itself—to that extent a less soulful, a more dispirited place. But in that final darkling passage of the Hegelian owl over the extinguished fire of “man,” something like a full and final comprehension of its grandeur will at last come to light, before twinkling out altogether.

The library we come across in Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road, attests to an extinction having befallen both the books and the spirit to which those books corresponded:

Years later he’d stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He’d not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation. He let the book fall and took a last look around and made his way out into the cold gray light. (199)

The books arranged here betray their serially broken promise. In their “heavy bloated pages,” they have been reduced to lumpish materiality, body without spirit, the latter of which seems to have taken flight along with Minerva’s owl: “a world to come,” “an expectation,” an extraterritorial, utopian no-place that is irreducible to the matter on which it is predicated. Literature, that seemingly inexhaustible intra referential system of dream, fantasy, illusion, projection, imprecation, beatification, imagination, and fancy, here subjected to an anonymous collective rage at such gargantuan betrayal, and left blackened and saturated; a guilty pulp fiction.

The recasting of the abstract fecund promise into countless individual “lies” is a literary allusion. From this ruined library, the last book looks back over its shoulder to glimpse what is arguably the first: Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Recall how that paradigmatic picaresque begins with the assembly of the eponymous hero’s library, and note the affective force this library has in the shaping of his spirit. “Everything he read in his books took possession of his imagination,” we read:

enchantments, fights, battles, challenges, wounds, sweet nothings, love affairs, storms and impossible absurdities. The idea that this whole fabric of famous fabrications was real so established itself in his mind that no history of the world was truer for him.²

For Cervantes, mere empirical truth is elevated via the intensified “truth” of books to create a wholly literary worldview. It is a worldview that is, by the author’s later admission, absolutely and unforgivably false (“my only desire has been to make men hate those false, absurd histories in books of chivalry”³). The novel as a form finds its most ardent motivations in precisely this negative desire, this ferocious modernizing will to traduce, invert, explode, and denounce feudal absurdities; and yet this statement of ideological intent only offsets the exuberance that drives the book’s narrative, which takes flight from its hero’s perfect, self-satisfying immersion in his own well-stocked library.

After Don Quixote’s first quest he falls ill, raving mad, so that the town’s priest thinks it best to burn the books and to seal off the library:

One of the remedies that the priest and the barber has prescribed at that time for their friend’s malady was to have his library walled up and sealed off so that he couldn’t find his books when he got up—maybe if the cause was removed the effect might cease—and to tell him that an enchanter had carried them off, with the library and all; and this was done without delay. Two days later Don Quixote did get up, and his first action was to go and look at his books; and, since he couldn’t find the room in which he’d left them, he wandered all over the house searching for it. He kept going up to the place where the door used to be, and feeling for it with his hands, and running his eyes backwards and forwards over the walls without uttering a word . . .⁴

Like the man in The Road, Don Quixote turns out to the “cold gray light” and silently continues on his quest. What is different, however, is that in Cervantes’ text there is a palpable sense of hope, for the noble picaro has already internalized the library and is driven forward by its lessons no matter how false they might be. It is thus that this first conflagration inspires the epic quest, around which the first book is constructed, and whose final steps are being taken in The Road.

Don Quixote’s library comprised countless romances and histories of chivalry, which together negatively conditioned the novel’s openly critical form. What books can we imagine lining the shelves of the charred library in The Road? “There is no prophet in the earth’s long chronicle who’s not honored here today,” we read. “Whatever form you spoke of you were right.” (297) If The Road has its prophets surely they will be have been lifted from the canon of American prose (Melville, Whitman, Faulkner, Hemingway), from Anglo-Irish poetics (Beckett, Yeats, Eliot), and from European expression (Kafka, Mandelstam, Baudelaire). If these are the books that populate McCarthy’s blasted library, then perhaps it will be wise to conjecture on McCarthy’s engagement with the project named modernism, of which all of these earlier writers are either influentially prescient or major practitioners.

If McCarthy’s novel has any lingering commitment to the modernist masterpieces he alludes to, it is to be discerned at the level of style. Here is David Trotter on modernist form:

In modernist writing, mimesis is not so much an end in itself as an occasion for the triumph of poesis. Both novelists and poets invoked through their choice of subject matter and technique a resistance to literature which they knew would yield only to the excess literature at their command.⁵

McCarthy’s novel lacks the sense of narrative destiny we would otherwise associate with the “quest,” and it rejects the cheap thrills of contemporary apocalypse scenarios; but what it most wants to evoke is this very stylistic “signature” of poesis peculiar to modernist letters. This is why John Hillcoat’s genuflectingly faithful film adaptation lacked the tremendous energy of its literary source: the book’s mimetic narrative was only ever a precursor to its style, which cannot be translated in any simple way into a medium other than prose; to film and project The Road is to lose sight of that. “This tendency in modernist theory and practice,” Trotter continues, “might be thought of, by analogy with Nietzsche’s will-to-power and will-to-life, as a will-to-literature. Modernism was one of the fiercest campaign ever mounted in the favor of literature.”⁶

That said, let us add one more library to our collection: the quintessentially modernist one in Ulysses’ “Scylla and Charybdis”:

Rest suddenly possessed the discreet vaulted cell, rest of warm and brooding air.

A vestal’s lamp.

Here he ponders things that were not: what Caesar would have lived to do had he believed the soothsayer: what might have been: possibilities of the possible as possible: things not known: what name Achilles bore when he lived among women.

Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words. Thoth, god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned. And I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest. In painted chambers loaded with tilebooks.

They are still. Once quick in the brains of men. Still: but an itch of death is in them, to tell me in my ear a maudlin tale, urge me to wreck their will.⁷

Joyce’s library also speaks to its own extinction; and indeed, these shelves line the walls of a pharaonic tomb. However, what is remarkable here is the style in which that extinction is reckoned: death is only the dialectical antithesis to life; from stillness comes action, and that action is presented here as the “excess” of literature at the author’s command. It is by opening up a space of “things that were not” that literature fulfills its treacherous promise, and it opens up that space via the stylization of its form. It creates unpredictable spaces of what Joyce refers to as “possibilities of the possible as possible” and what McCarthy’s narrator calls “a world to come.” Could it be, then, that The Road is a belated addition to a modernist spirit first energized by Cervantes and reactivated through Joyce?

Certainly, in a true modernist fashion, the book performs its own doomed refusal to go gently into the good night of an ordained extinction, at the level of a stubborn stylistic singularity. It stakes a claim to literary style as the final, precious barrier between itself and the void it viscerally conjures up in narrative and imaginary form. Style flickers like a last taper in the harsh winds blown down along the soggy library shelves, lighting here and there on some stray phrase, some lost chronicle of humankind, in order to poach from them a stubborn force—a subjectivity—that has not yet succumbed to the general darkness. It works according to a fairly obvious economy. Page after page of the most minimal sentence forms—“He froze. He was wrapped in one of the grey blankets and he would have been hard to see but not impossible. But he thought probably they had smelled the smoke. They stood talking. Then they went on. He sat down” (88–9)—as if to indicate a craven capitulation to the degree zero of American fiction: distaste for the more complex moods, syntactical simplicity, active voice, rabid aversion from hypotaxis, a tendency to verbless asyndeton and parataxis, sourceless anaphora, and an air of “adaptability,” like so many airport novels and bestsellers, as if written with the film rights uppermost in mind. But among this narrative dictatorialness, a stray locution, phrase, or simple word occasionally intrudes, as if to establish a fragile bulwark of resistance: “the corrugate shapes of old harrowtroughs,” (208) “he knelt and laid him in the gritty duff,” (123) “like a grave yawning at judgment day in some old apocalyptic painting,” (165) “that silent corridor through the drifting ash where they struggled forever in the road’s cold coagulate.” (204) Yeats’ falcon has flown wide and away from the falconer to whom it is only a distant memory, but its gyres still drive the sentences in with it is remembered:

In that long ago somewhere very near this place he’d watched a falcon fall down the long blue wall of the mountain and break with the keel of its breastbone the midmost from a flight of cranes and take it to the river below all gangly and wrecked and trailing its loose and blowsy plumage in the still autumn air. (19)

And then a whole, isolated paragraph whose overt function is to preserve “style” against the relentless indicative tyranny: “Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.” (209)

The functioning of this stylistic economy is quite clear: style appears amid the routine production of narrative sentences like the fossilized prints of an extinct mammal, left in the baking tar eons ago; calling to mind a “book” that might vouchsafe the legislative authority of those august modernist “fathers” collectively responsible for establishing literature’s urgent moral value in a wilderness of prose. And yet never refashioning it as such: this late book is not a “book” in that sense (Mallarmé’s Livre du monde⁸), and it cannot be. It ploughs an exhausted literary harrowtrough with the dulled equipment of a vanished past; the moments of intensity it gives rise to are the sparks thrown off by that edgeless blade as it strikes the insensible rocks of the present. If it posits a style of extinction (and thus constructs a self-conscious constellation with Beckett and Coetzee), it is one unleavened by that irrefragable quotient of transformativity—of possibility within circumscription—which characterizes all modernisms, even the very late ones. All-too precious in its moments of virtuosity, unable to find a formal solution to the binary oscillation between narrative and style, The Road consciously performs the epiphenomenal, inconsequential status of literature’s state of exception today: its lapsing from a Borgesian library, full of shimmering and terrifying possibility, into a charred ruin of the same, where nothing remains but the disappointment of that expectation.

If there is a point on which all of the essays in this volume converge, it is that of style—style as what negates, but also as what succumbs to, the entropic horizon of what, inexorably, is. These essays are full of disagreements, and find as much to distrust and question as they do to celebrate and admire in a book so exquisitely positioned on the undecidable formal cusp between postmodern readability and modernist dis-/re-enchantment. Yet they all share an impulse of sober analytic attentiveness, as if every word in the text counted; as if the pages of this book are what they sometimes purport to be—well-nigh sacred, apocalyptic in the true sense of issuing a vision for a community of believers. Attuned to the cultural ironies of this portentous religiosity of a paperback bestseller, the essays assembled here are nonetheless united in their serious dedication to the old-fashioned tasks of close reading and hermeneutics; finding equivocal sustenance in a novel that simultaneously advances and retracts its own lite...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• A note on the texts
• 1 Introduction: “The charred ruins of a library”
• 2 “The cold illucid world”: The poetics of gray in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
• 3 McCarthy’s rhythm
• 4 Spring has lost its scent: Allegory, ruination, and suicidal melancholia in The Road
• 5 The late world of Cormac McCarthy
• 6 Road, fire, trees: Cormac McCarthy’s post-America
• 7 The cave and The Road: Styles of forgotten dreams
• 8 McCarthy’s fire
• 9 Afterword: Acts of kindness—reflections on a different kind of road movie
• Notes on contributors
• Index